Category: Culture

This article was produced as part of JTA’s Teen Journalism Fellowship, a program that works with Jewish teens around the world to report on issues that affect their lives. MIAMI (JTA) —After spending her early childhood in Venezuela, it was not always easy for Gabriella Koenig to feel connected to the Jewish community she grew up […]

(JTA) — On March 15, 1943, the first train bound for Auschwitz departed from the northern Greek city of Thessaloniki, once home to one of the largest Sephardic Jewish communities in the world.  Eighty years later, the city’s documentary film festival is paying tribute to Jews killed during the Holocaust and to the Jewish community’s […]

(New York Jewish Week) — American Eagle Outfitters now has a mezuzah on the front door of its flagship Times Square location, courtesy of Chabad, the Hasidic outreach movement. The parchment with Jewish holy text in an oblong metallic case, traditionally a marker of a Jewish home or establishment, was affixed on the apparel brand’s […]

(New York Jewish Week) — Stuart Meyers grew up in the heavily Jewish Philadelphia suburb of Voorhees Township, New Jersey. Yet, even though he was Jewish, being queer meant that he often felt like an outsider in Jewish spaces. Fortunately, as an adult, Meyers — a dancer, artist and nightlife events producer — realized that, instead of […]

NEW YORK (JTA) — Sidney Brustein, Jewish Hamlet?  Anne Kauffman thinks so. She made the comparison in a phone interview about the play she’s directing — a buzzy production of Lorraine Hansberry’s “The Sign in Sidney Brustein’s Window” that opened on Monday at the Brooklyn Academy of Music starring Oscar Isaac and Rachel Brosnahan. “One […]

(J. The Jewish News of Northern California via JTA) — There is a Grammy Award for just about every kind of music — from pop to metal to New Age to Contemporary Christian — but there’s no Jewish category. Two Jewish musician friends hope to change that. Joanie Leeds, a children’s musician and Grammy winner […]

(JTA) — As children in upstate New York, twin sisters Julia DeVillers and Jennifer Roy went to Hebrew school three days a week, spent their summers at a JCC summer camp and got to know local Holocaust survivors through their father, who survived the Nazis as a child in Poland. They also celebrated Christmas with […]

(JTA) — By this point, the film’s title might only be unknown to those who have been hibernating: “Cocaine Bear,” a black comedy very loosely based on a true story from 1985, is the talk of the town in Hollywood and beyond leading up to its theatrical debut on Friday. One of the movie’s stars, […]

(JTA) — The real Mordecai Samel, at the time in his late 70s, really didn’t want an iPhone in 2015. The Holocaust survivor who had been living in South Florida since 2004 didn’t see a need. His taped-together flip phone worked fine. But his son Marvin insisted. One thing that helped convince Mordecai to give […]

(JTA) — Chaim Bloom, the Jewish chief baseball officer of the Boston Red Sox, told the Boston Globe he has received death threats and an antisemitic slur as his team has struggled in recent seasons. Bloom, a Jewish day school alumnus who observes Shabbat and keeps kosher, took the helm of the Red Sox in […]